From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55E07BC69 for ; Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:13:56 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AgAAAB45RUfU436rnmdsb2JhbACPMAEBBwQGKQ X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.21,452,1188770400"; d="scan'208";a="19578215" Received: from moutng.kundenserver.de ([212.227.126.171]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 22 Nov 2007 17:13:55 +0100 Received: from [152.78.96.56] (babylon.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de [141.84.136.30]) by mrelayeu.kundenserver.de (node=mrelayeu1) with ESMTP (Nemesis) id 0MKwpI-1IvEgb3vSj-0004PI; Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:13:54 +0100 Message-ID: <4745AC7A.1050909@functionality.de> Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:21:14 +0000 From: Thomas Fischbacher User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060607 Debian/1.7.12-1.2 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Andrej.Bauer@andrej.com Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] caml and python References: <474481A0.2000703@functionality.de> <4744AAFB.8090703@fmf.uni-lj.si> <4744C062.1020605@functionality.de> <47459E87.4000504@fmf.uni-lj.si> In-Reply-To: <47459E87.4000504@fmf.uni-lj.si> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Provags-ID: V01U2FsdGVkX1+DlOPVjR+HC97Fwy4+RtDdjQPClWLJYGRiVnI psm5a7sLUP+crKXuDwCtn4Tuep0lwi+WP8s/WICGAtPadgDwVa Lx7UHcrLsAco/RC1aQTyw== X-Spam: no; 0.00; andrej:01 ocaml:01 algebra:01 javascript:98 wrote:01 partial:01 caml-list:01 formalism:01 caml:02 motivation:02 python:03 python:03 inquiry:96 size:95 scheme:05 Andrej, > thank you for your reply. I did not realize you actually married python > and ocaml so closely. Well, we sort-of had to. > My inquiry was actually geared towards getting some sort of > Mathematica-like front-end environment that could link to a > computational "core" (or cores) running as separate processes. Are there > any pooor man's frontends out there? I am aware of Texmacs and Sage. > Texmacs strikes me a bit idiosyncratic, while Sage scares me in sheer > size. I just want a nice little general-purpose frontend that can do an > interactive loop and show pictures and math formulas as results. I have played around with Texmacs myself a few years ago, but considered it way too weak for heavy-duty applications. I think that if visualizing maths in a front-end is your main concern, you may be better off hooking up the computational core to a webserver and use a web-browser as your front-end. Then, you can think about MathML rendering and a JavaScript or even Java-based user interface. (Concerning Java, it is rather convenient to write Java applets in Per Bothner's Kawa Scheme rather than in Java.) This can be a very convenient approach provided you have full continuation support in your computational core. Here is a prototype for a webbrowser-as-maths-user-interface I wrote a few years ago (taking mzscheme as a basis, as this provides call/cc): http://141.84.136.30:8000/ The preprint thaat describes the idea is here: http://de.arxiv.org/abs/cs/0406002 The original motivation for a pattern-language based term manipulation tool came from supergravity, where you have to do a lot of nasty ("fierzing") tensor and spinor algebra. However, I never found the time to evolve this idea into a really useful tool for that particular job. A more reasonable first goal for a demo application would be the formalism of partial derivatives used in thermodynamics. -- best regards, Thomas Fischbacher tf@functionality.de